Written from the impassive surface of the Internet and the high desert of Southern California, CRYSTAL MARYS is a field study of social-media fatigue, suburban youth, Filipino immigrancy, a denim day job in LA's garment district, and other sites of crystallized dis/enchantment. Molina traces life's "beautiful unreliable narrative logic" by the devotional images of our times—the Virgin Mary, emoji, family photos, profile pics, etc.

The Free & Natural Poetry Faire is a gala of poetry, art, and arcana. It is our belief that poetry itself is by its nature transdisciplinary, and, to that end, the Faire will create a collaborative and unrestrained space where poetry will coexist for two days with many other art and knowledge forms. True to its name, the Free & Natural Poetry Faire is free and open to the public. This will be the first of a series of Free & Natural Poetry events.

The fourth issue in the “Poetic Series” is a seasonally themed special issue, a festive anthology composed of contributions from more than twenty writers and artists. Each interpreting the theme in an unconventional and abstract sense, it is an alternative omnibus of everyone's favorite and most controversial holiday. Artwork is provided in the form of a colorful collection of romance covers illustrated by Vicki Khuzami. The “Poetic Series” brings together works of poetry and literature in combination with visual art, introducing young as well as established writers concerned with challenging the boundaries of traditional forms of narrative. Initiated by Keren Cytter and coedited with Fiona Bryson. Copublished with A.P.E (Art Projects Era).

I believe we all work with a fundamental rupture within ourselves. What is important is to dare to know, to accept and address it through artistic means . . . What I write, what I've been able to do and to experience, is a question of being. Much more than the body, being is what torments me, if I can use the word torment for this. I mean quite simply the fact that we exist.

As soon we look at Mayer’s images, we immediately find ourselves in a different territory—one that appears explicitly personal and autobiographical, fraught with memory and subjectivity. The color is lush, and the look and feel hews closer to the diary films of Jonas Mekas . . . than to models of conceptual photography. Yet unlike the overt markers of subjectivity and personal style in Mekas’s work . . . the quasi-systematic aspect of Mayer’s project—36 photos a day, every day—has the effect of abstracting the images and foregrounding their generic quality: they are from her life, but they could be almost anyone’s . . . the very intensity of surface detail in Mayer’s Memory paradoxically atomizes personal experience into an endless flow of pictures and recited recollections; its authorship is distributed among various functions that don’t necessarily cohere into a single self . . . Needless to say, in their look and feel, Mayer’s photographs could not be further from the resolutely “banal” black and white snapshots that we usually associate with conceptual art. Their frequent nighttime lighting and dim interiors at times bring them closer to Nan Goldin’s early work, though without the cloying stagey feel. Images resonant with narrative and personal history are followed by fire hydrants and parking lots—not the carefully chosen “architectural banal” of Ed Ruscha, just the parking lots that surround everyday life in almost any city or town . . . It is all too easy to imagine a present-day artist selecting out the “poetic” moments from such scenes, making tableaux of artfully arranged trash to strategically reference Arte Povera or site-based art. Mayer’s hippy profusion of randomness breathes in a way that the claustrophobic pictures of more recent so-called “post-conceptual” practice cannot.